goals

I have a few goals for the new year. NOT resolutions. The usual, of course: lose the weight. Yadda Yadda Yadda. I am working on a post about that that I will share at a later date. But for sure:

Drink more water.

Read 165 books.

Eat more vegetables in my diet.

Practice patience.

Learn how to alleviate stress/anxiety (without medication).

I think the first three goals are definitely doable. The last goal, I do not know if I can do. That’s part of the weight loss post I am working.

Drink more water — when I was breastfeeding I was doing SO GOOD at drinking water. Seriously, I was a rockstar. I had to be. To keep my supply up. But then once that was over with, I kinda got lazy. I am good at drinking water at work and I am good at drinking water at the gym. But at home? On the weekends? Not so much. I don’t know why I am so bad at it but I need to be better. I am noticing the effects of not drinking it and I need to fix that asap.

Read 165 books — that’s how many I read in 2018! I think my goal last year was 120 and I exceeded it! I am already off to a decent start.

Eat more veggies — I love vegetables, so that’s not too bad of a goal for me. However, when I snack, I usually reach for fruit. I am going to make a sincere effort to try and incorporate more veggies as snacks, too.

Patience — Logan is a joy for sure but we are definitely in a time period in his development that is challenging for all of us. He is almost three years old (!!!!!) and strong willed, determined and wants to do EVERYTHING himself. Which often takes forever. It can sometimes be very frustrating for me. We get into power struggles and I need to really work on patience and stopping the power struggles.

What are your goals for the new year?

Now on to the recipe…

In an effort to eat more veggies AND try and satisfy that pizza craving without all the carbs, I experimented with zucchini pizzas last night! It actually turned out really well! We both liked it a lot. With some tweaking, I will make it again.

But first, for the funny little story — I got ready to make dinner and realized I had bought cucumbers instead of zucchinis (are you kidding me?!?!). I went to the store near our house (THEY WERE OUT!!) and had to go to ANOTHER grocery store. Sheesh.

Ok, so back home, I cute the ends off the zucchini, cut them in half, and then scraped the insides out to create “boats”. Next time I would make a little cute on the bottom so they would stay more flat on the tray.

Then I filled the indentations with the pizza sauce, pizza seasoning, cheese, topped it with pepperoni, olives and onions and a little more cheese. I baked it at 375 for about 20 minutes. Michael had a good idea to bake the zucchini naked for some of that time before doing all the toppings and then baking it the rest of the time. I will try that next time.

It was delicious and sort of satisfied the pizza craving, but not the bread craving. I would definitely make this again though!

I did pretty well in February with the goals I set out for myself. I am going to continue the squats (modified) and organizing the house. I recently spent a few hours going through stuff in the garage and sorting stuff, getting rid of things, recycling a bunch of empty boxes we were hoarding for some reason…they weren’t even good boxes! So I am slowly and surely making my life at home a little more cleaner and simplified.

There’s a bunch of stuff I still need to go through to figure out if we are going to donate or sell it. For example, cleaning the garage I found two giant boxes of puppy pads from when we got Bella (ahem, a few years ago now) and never used because she was potty trained! Why do we still have these?!? So I sold them! I took an entire carload full of stuff to Goodwill to donate. Usually I give stuff to the Vietnam Veterans but I wanted the stuff gone asap so I just drove it to Goodwill. It felt so good to get rid of things!

We have other stuff to donate but I think we need to call Habitat for Humanity. We have an old medicine cabinet that is still pretty nice, some other house construction stuff…it seems better to donate that stuff there.

Now, on to March:

1 ) No Desserts Monday – Thursday Nights

This one is going to be HARD. I have such a sweet tooth. But I really need to reign it in. I was under so much stress with some stuff that’s been going lately that I was really out of control with eating chocolate at home. It was bad. I gained a few pounds in the last two months as a result (2 since December). DAMMIT.

So I am going to make a valiant effort to not eat sweets during the week. Wish me luck!

2) Register for a few 5k Races

There are two 5k races I want to sign up for with the Portland Parks & Rec $5 5K series.I want to register for those and I may look at some other races for this fall. I think it would be fun to do the Halloween Run Like Hell 5k. That was my first race ever (many years ago). It might be cool to do it again!

3) Drink 80 ounces of water every day.

I’m hoping this will help me with some of the issues I’ve been having: dry winter skin, feeling dehydrated, maybe it will help curb my appetite a bit.

I currently drink somewhere between 24 ounces and 40 ounces at work and I drink a sparkling water with lunch and dinner. But I can definitely be doing better.

4 ) Learn how to use my new Pressure Cooker!

I am SO excited about this. I have a bunch of recipes I’ve been saving to try once I got one. I am especially excited about making hard boiled eggs. I’m also curious about making soups and stews. If you have a favorite recipe, let me know!